Artists’ creative process is usually a solitary enterprise carried out in the isolation of one’s studio. In David Maroto’s new project this process has been opened up by means of the organization of a Game Group Reading Club (GGRC), which integrates collective participation in the creative process itself. GGRC was formed by a group that has been engaging in discussions concerning games, art and literature, notions of playability, participation, fiction and identification.

Maroto’s project is formed by three interrelated pieces: a new Gamebook (The Wheel of Fortune), a collective game event (Decide Your Destiny), and a narrative installation (La Escala de la Vida). These pieces form a hybrid artistic experiment that unites both fields of his interest, games and narrative fiction. The gamebook will be published by Onomatopee (Eindhoven). This creative process becomes public with the collaboration of the Rotterdam-based organisations of ADA and PrintRoom, and will find continuation during its public presentation in Onomatopee Project Space.

For the fourth and last GGRC session, coinciding with The Wheel of Fortune’s book launch in September, Maroto invites you to join him at ADA to discuss participation in art. The guest speaker Yoeri Guepin has selected the text The Emancipated Spectator by Jacques Rancière, which critically analyses relations between seeing and passivity, looking and knowing, externality and separation.

Afterwards, GGRC participants are invited to play Decide Your Destiny, a collective game event in which an actor reads The Wheel of Fortune out aloud. The audience votes for the direction to follow in the narrative, the actions to carry out, and the answers to give to other characters. Whereas reading a book is usually a solitary activity, in Decide Your Destiny, the fate of the protagonist, even her survival, is a matter of collective responsibility.

David Maroto’s artistic practice unfolds around two intersections: between literature and visual arts on one hand and the use of the game as an artistic method on the other, while distilling components from the purview of psychoanalysis as a tool for reflecting on the nature of subjectivity.